Mostly for weird glitches like chickens reporting you to the guards, launching bears to the moon, epileptic rag dolls, guards noticing a dead body then just chillaxing, infinite stats, those friggen cliff racers, holes in the dungeon letting you drop into infinity, etc.

Tyndmyr wrote:Do corpses eventually fade? I've had some in game a while now, and while at first it was annoying, I thought about lugging them back to my base and making a giant pile.

Yeah and fairly quickly I've found for the most part. After killing all the raiders in concorde I had used one to store all the crap I picked up since I couldn't fast travel. On the second trip back it had already disappeared =/

If they're not disappearing maybe it's a bug? Or some sort of special body/item type on the corpse that doesn't let them disappear.

Seems to be a bunch of them. At the diner, every time I fast travel there, I get another coupla raiders right away. There when I port in. I kill them, and they get added to the pile. I never spent much time at the diner, just trading, so maybe that's it? Dunno. Just sorta starting to build up. A giant pile of corpses doesn't bother me, mind you, just seems kind of hilarious.

Izawwlgood wrote:I ask totally not sarcastically, but as someone who has played a lot of Bethesda games in the past, and thought a few hilarious bugs/glitches popped up every now and then, are Bethesda games particularly known for being buggy/glitchy?

Have I just gotten fortunate and not really pushed my luck with game breaking behavior?

I'm playing on xbox one, and it's been pretty good. No major crashes, corruptions, etc. I do quicksave routinely from habit, but it's not been necessary to restore on account of bugs.

I have seen one or two hilarious glitches, though...apparently, when dealing with burrowing molerats and dogmeat, the resulting vector math can result in a hilarious slow-mo of both flying implausibly far into the air. Not a big deal...it's not far enough to cause significant problems(ie, still in rifle range), so you just laugh, murder everything, and continue.

In 3, this was definitely not the case, and I reloaded several times to fix this and that. I also saw no end of craziness in Skyrim, so...from my perspective, yeah, Bethesda kind of has a rep. In fairness, that sort of super complex game is just more likely to have strange interactions, simply because it's so difficult to consider and test everything in advance.

My experience hasn't been really terrible, except when I add hundreds of mods which obviously creates instability not blameable on Bethesda, but they do seem known for releasing games with tons of problems (which usually but by no means always get patched).

Part of it obviously comes with the territory when you make a game as open-ended as Fallout or the Elder Scrolls, where so many quests can be done in any order you like, and pretty much the whole map is technically accessible from the beginning. (As in, you can physically go there, albeit at a significant risk to life and limb at lower levels.) But I realized as soon as I paid closer attention that in FO4 I'm happily tolerating clipping issues and minor quest and dialogue trigger bugs that would really surprise me from other studios.

Still, nothing too bad so far. My biggest disappointment is that the entirety of Somerville seems to be simply not there, even though the space for it is.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Izawwlgood wrote:Have I just gotten fortunate and not really pushed my luck with game breaking behavior?

In 4, not really. There are some weird glitches that are funny but not really game breaking, but overall it seems stable. I haven't had a single crash to desktop in my 40-some hours of play. Once I ironed out the .ini tweaks the game has run great for me. It's definitely better than 3 was, in terms of glitches and stability.

The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

What did you change in your .ini? I haven't sought out guides because everything runs well enough as it is, but there are long loads and framerate drops that I suppose might be somewhat fixable with a minor change.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

In Fallout 3, New Vegas, Oblivion, and Skyrim I've experienced issues where I couldn't complete some side quests. I played them all at least a year after release, but on the console where I couldn't get the unofficial patch or fix it with the console. It's not a huge deal, as usually these are minor quests like "find this item and bring it to x" but I previously found the item and it won't let be give it to them. Also, in Skyrim you are supposed to get infinite Dark Brotherhood assassination contraccts, but these stopped after like three for me, but it's not like it doesn't get old fast.

The rage in their eyes, torches in their handsAnd the power of the cross bringing fear to all the landAnd darkness will come to us all.

Izawwlgood wrote:I ask totally not sarcastically, but as someone who has played a lot of Bethesda games in the past, and thought a few hilarious bugs/glitches popped up every now and then, are Bethesda games particularly known for being buggy/glitchy?

Have I just gotten fortunate and not really pushed my luck with game breaking behavior?

Daggerfall (1996) was unbeatable without a patch. Getting a patch in 1996, or even being aware one existed, was no small feat. Both it and Arena (1994) also crashed all the time, and saves would regularly corrupt for no reason.

I remember playing Morrowind in 2-3 hour bursts, as it would crash to desktop somewhere in the 3-4 hour mark, without fail.

Oblivion and Fallout 3 were both full of blue screen and CTD bugs, quests that broke if you did another quest first, had certain quests active, had too many quests or too few quests.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

I've noticed a few teleportation bugs. In a cutscene conversation with someone, mid sentence, my character inexplicably teleported a meter away facing the other direction, and the conversation continued like that. I've also teleported across a room; that was disorientating. I think the game thought I was stuck. Speaking of, I have gotten stuck on geometry multiple times, as is standard. The most memorable being falling into a hole on the second story of a building onto a counter top on the first. I was trying to descend and didn't see that it was a trap. I couldn't jump back up, and couldn't move because of the neck-high floor all around me. If they would finally make the stealth button an actual crouch I would have been fine, but my console-fu is strong anyhow.

I've also had dialogue options not update properly once. As soon as I was given the response from the NPC it gave me the conversation options of my last choice. Then the NPC started saying some more things, and I would guess that when the NPC finished it gave me a second list of conversation options that I couldn't see. So when I selected from the first list, I had made a decision based on the second list. It doesn't seem like you can make important decisions in any conversation in the game though so it made no difference.

gmalivuk wrote:What did you change in your .ini? I haven't sought out guides because everything runs well enough as it is, but there are long loads and framerate drops that I suppose might be somewhat fixable with a minor change.

I changed the FOV to 90 since the default was making me feel motion sick. Removed mouse acceleration because fuck that. I also lowered shadow distance even further below the "medium" setting since there's no "low" setting in the options for some reason. It sorta helped with the outdoor frame drops but really I think my video card is just too weak to handle it well. Not a huge deal, US thanksgiving is coming up so I'll probably grab a new video card along with the SSD I wanted to purchase (should solve the loading time issues too). Mouse sensitivity is different in the X and Y axes by default too I think. I haven't fixed that yet but I was getting annoyed by it yesterday when doing some missions. Should be able to find that somewhere in the .ini file.

gmalivuk wrote:What did you change in your .ini? I haven't sought out guides because everything runs well enough as it is, but there are long loads and framerate drops that I suppose might be somewhat fixable with a minor change.

I did most of what Chen talked about, plus I unlocked the framerate in-game and then manually locked it with RivaTuner to 85 FPS. I was getting a weird issue where I would freeze after exiting a terminal if my FPS was too high OR if my framerate was locked by the game itself.

Really, the biggest quality-of-life change was the FOV adjustment. It's defaulted to 70, which is abysmal, so I set it to 95.

Just keep in mind that some of these changes have to be made in both the Fallout.ini file and the FalloutPrefs.ini file, otherwise the game will overwrite with the original values once you boot it up. I'm not sure why.

You only need to change it in the prefs file, because while the game uses the non-prefs ini, it gets overwritten with the contents of the prefs file at launch. It's dumb.

I'm playing a stealth character, but the best weapon I've found so far (level 20) is an auto pipe gun with bleed damage and armor piercing. The bleed damage is stupidly overpowered, and the gun uses the most common ammunition in the game. There's no point to using my silenced pistol until I can get all of the perks to deal anything close to the damage that this thing is doing.

The first time I made it to Diamond City it was Halloween in-game, with unique dialogue and decorations. Apparently they do the same thing for Christmas. Little details like that, and having done the quest at the covenant, I'm really liking this game. It's gradually rising towards my GotY spot when I expected nothing from it.

Game crashed on first startup, forced me to reboot my computer. Started up second time no problem.

The named raiders harassing the trader in the diner keep getting new equipment. I shoot them, strip them bare, and later they've got more gear again, and they're still dead.

Dog disappeared completely when I loaded the game one time. I couldn't find where he'd gone off to, even though he was there with me in Sanctuary Hills when I saved and quit.

Dog bites and drags a raider, I headshot said raider, raider gets launched in to the air (kind of a standard Bethesda bug).

Raiders keep shooting me through metal-mesh catwalks, but when I pull a dead on sniper shot through the same catwalk the round bounces.

Sanctuary Hills production of "Settler on the Roof" (and no,I don't have any stairs up to the roof).

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

Anyone else getting a bug where workshop mode fails to highlight or allow any interaction with some of the things you've built? It seems to be with some but not all of the structures that need settlers assigned to them.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

gmalivuk wrote:Anyone else getting a bug where workshop mode fails to highlight or allow any interaction with some of the things you've built? It seems to be with some but not all of the structures that need settlers assigned to them.

I've seen a problem with tato plants, in particular; it seems like once they're placed, it'll sometimes allow you to try and move them closer, then once they're placed, you can't highlight them again. I suspect it's that there's some kind of desync between where it thinks they are and where they actually are; looking off at some random point far away from them seemed to highlight them at one point. Other than that, the only thing I've noticed is that I can't assign a settler to a store while another settler is already manning it, if I want to swap them.

One thing I'm noticing is that now that I've finally gotten my stores up, caps have gone from "basically irrelevant" since I never bought anything to "basically irrelevant" since I have a near-infinite supply.

Spoiler:

I feel like having sellable Purified Water produced by your settlements "in the background' may have been a mistake; if it wasn't sellable for whatever reason, or at least not to your own town's vendors, it wouldn't feel quite as much like printing money.

existential_elevator wrote:It's like a jigsaw puzzle of Hitler pissing on Mother Theresa. No individual piece is offensive, but together...

If you think hot women have it easy because everyone wants to have sex at them, you're both wrong and also the reason you're wrong.

Whichever level designer put the fast travel point for West Everett Estates close enough to radioactive barrels to be in a +12 rads/s zone is a jerk.

Also, huzzah, level 23, finally able to take the second rank of the Scrapper perk! Excitedly, I rushed to the workbench with my hundreds upon hundreds of guns and armors I've been hoarding for this very moment and...er...discovered that it may have been a waste of a perk point. The vast majority of things still just break down into, like, 1 steel (especially armors); it seems to mostly be a way to recoup a small percentage of the rarer materials in installed mods, or squeak out a fiber optics or nuke material here and there. Overall, probably better just selling them for caps and then buying junk with that material, though maybe that'll get better once higher-level guns are dropping more regularly (among other things, I notice that automatic laser rifles include fiber optics, while regular ones only include circuitry, and laser pistols not even that).

But all those pipe pistols and raider armor and whatnot? Yeah, basically just steel, perk or no perk. At least you can get some screws out of the guns relatively frequently, but that probably needs either rank 1 or no perk at all.

EDIT: Oooooh. The main benefit of the perk isn't in the "scrapping rare components" bit, but the other part I'd written off as fluff - when it says "items with favorited components are highlighted", it doesn't mean "weapons and armor get the magnifying-glass symbol like junk does if they have something you want", it means "items in the world with a favorited components get a VATS-style highlight". Containers *containing* items that contain a favorited component (whew) glow too. Potentially nice to make sure you don't miss a hiding gas canister, but could be a little annoying with the workbench permanently glowing for the rest of time. Range of the highlight is fairly short, about fifteen feet or so.

EDIT 2: I am now seriously contemplating tagging every material except maybe Steel and the like, to help make sure I don't miss any delicious, delicious junk. And am sad that I can't tag ammo, stimpaks, weapons, etc.

existential_elevator wrote:It's like a jigsaw puzzle of Hitler pissing on Mother Theresa. No individual piece is offensive, but together...

If you think hot women have it easy because everyone wants to have sex at them, you're both wrong and also the reason you're wrong.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

DaBigCheez wrote:But all those pipe pistols and raider armor and whatnot? Yeah, basically just steel, perk or no perk. At least you can get some screws out of the guns relatively frequently, but that probably needs either rank 1 or no perk at all.

You need to find weapons and armor that have mods on them. Look for prefixes in the name, or "+" at the end. I've gotten nuclear material from pipe weapons with glowing sights before.

The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

So, my roommate was showing me the entrance to the tunnels under Concord, and once I see the door in I turn around and head back out. My roommate asks me why I am heading away from the tunnels.

"I just got finished raiding the raiders in the Quarry, and my inventory is almost too heavy. I have to empty my dog."

To which he starts busting up laughing. "Man if I didn't know what you were talking about that would have sounded so wrong."

"I know, that's why I said it."

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

Alright, I just finished the main quest line with 18h playtime, which includes doing only a single side quest and spending some time upgrading a settlement. A few hours in, during a particularly annoying save-try-fail-reload-cycle I turned on god mode and continued to use it for the entire rest of the quest line. Why? The enjoyment I get from doing the main quest line lies in the story being told. However the story keeps getting interrupted by repeated, boring and contrived encounters with way to many NPCs. I can appreciate the challenge of completing an encounter using the available resources, but when the entire quest line is nothing but a string of these encounters with little variation, it stops being fun for me.1I think this boils down to three scenarios:1.) Keep below the power curve, doing missions as soon as they are available without doing scavenging and/or side missions to gather and improve resources. This runs into the problem outlined above.2.) Keep well above the power curve, cheesing through anything the game throws at you. First, this requires putting of the quest line until very late in the game. Second, this is almost indistinguishable from using god mode, except you're depleting resources you don't need anymore anyway.3.) Something in between, where you do missions whenever you feel ready for them. In principal that sounds right, in practice I'd lose that sense of urgency and continuity I love in following a game's story. Oh, faction X is attacking? Oh yeah, I'll be there in a bit, just doing some other things. You guys don't really need me there for a week or so, right? Great, see you then!

So taking option 4, do I feel like I cheated myself out of a more complete experience completing the quest line as it was intended? Not really, no. The encounters probably would have been more fun, but the story side would have suffered heavily.

As for the story itself: Hm, well it's not bad, but also not great because of a huge plot contrivance when choosing a certain faction over another. Basically the story sets the player up for a big moral choice, when there is a well pronounced and clear third option that'd be better for both factions. And of course you can't take that third option or make any compromises. You simply have to drown either a puppy or a kitten, you can't just take them both home! I understand that would have required additional work to implement that option, but this binary choice was just terrible.

1 Okay, I think this needs some elaboration. As a kid I enjoyed playing video games above most all other things and was not deterred by difficult sections. I had fun to keep doing it and felt the satisfaction of completing it after hours of trying. As an adult I still have that instinct to dismiss any complaints about difficulty as the whining of filthy casuals. But now my time is also a lot more valuable. Nowadays, playing the same section for hours better be damn fun or I lose interest quickly. If that demotes me to a filthy casual, so be it.

Yeah, the pacing of the main quest line is a bit off. If you're supposed to be really worried about your missing son, you're not going to take time out to work your way up the ranks of one or more other factions or do a bunch of random sidequests.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

I felt like the continuity of the main quest was irreparably broken by the time I got inside the power armor and stepped to the edge of the rooftop to see all of the raiders I was going to be mowing down. It was barely a few hours earlier that your character was living in the old world. I think they were afraid people would get bored with the opening sequence and so rushed through it, afraid that people would get bored with the lack of action and so had a big action sequence, and afraid that people would finish the main quest too fast and so padded it out with enemies. The theme is great, the execution is sloppy.

My lack of commitment to the MQ isn't going to make sense by the time I do it, but at the stage that I'm in it already doesn't make sense. My character is completely nonchalant in the voiced dialogue, I can hardly imagine how dead inside they would actually be. It would make a little more sense if the prewar stuff was about twice as long, with an expanded tutorial section similar to FO3 (the settlement tutorial could go here, overseeing a voluntary community project). Then coming from the vault, Codsworth could have asked me to sleep and maybe there could be a brief dream sequence of my character refocusing. That would help tremendously with my interest in the story. It needed to breathe if even just a little.

Well, I pushed the MQ to the side, the game is everything about exploration for me. There's a running gag of anthropomorphic teddy bears and skeletons in unusual circumstances, almost as though it were a competition between two level designers. Obby mentioned the flamingo drinking from the urinal, but also in that level is a mininuke in the side pocket of a pool table. Almost every level has a little something clever in the environment. It helps that junk is useful too, and the quick loot system.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

gmalivuk wrote:Yeah, the pacing of the main quest line is a bit off. If you're supposed to be really worried about your missing son, you're not going to take time out to work your way up the ranks of one or more other factions or do a bunch of random sidequests.

That is kind of odd. I justified focusing less at the "go to the glowing sea" bit on the basis that I have absolutely no equipment for surviving that, and should gather it. Seems kind of reasonable, at least so far as it can be.

In other news, it appears Cait loves it when you take all your clothes off, and you gain additional reputations every so often by the in game clock. In short, fast travelling across the map naked endlessly will make the two of you bond over your mutual love of no pants.

The pacing on my second playthrough makes a bit more in-world sense, though I still did many small sidequests and also after my first playthrough I always console myself some better gear and perks (because I only need to play the introductory and get-killedall-the-time levels once), so even at my lowish level I can handle the more difficult enemies.

As a military man through and through, this character quickly fell in with the Brotherhood of Steel (taking orders helps him avoid grief better than giving them as General of the Minutemen). Then he conveniently finds out who's behind the murder and kidnapping just before the BoS shows up in its full glory and declares war on that same antagonist, so continuing to advance through their ranks makes perfect sense as a means to finding his son.

Also, I suppose that some delays *after* completing "Reunions" make sense from a focused and dedicated good parenting perspective.

(Spoilers only for what's revealed in that quest.)

Spoiler:

Having learned that your kid has lived for several years with the Institute, and knowing how terrible much of the above-ground world is, a parent able to compatmentalize their grief somewhat might naturally want to ensure that the world they bring their son back to is a relatively safe and stable place, which means making at least one settlement safe and supplied and getting on the good side of the Minutemen who protect it, and/or throwing in whith the BoS who obviously have the tech to provide far more stability than exists throughout most of the Wasteland.

Plus, finding out your kid is no longer an infant might result in fear and reluctance, as you'd be confronting a total stranger who might know nothing (or lies) about you and thus have no way to know what to expect.

Spoiler for anyone who hasn't reached the Institute and met its leader yet.

Spoiler:

I am pleased with how they worked in the "twist" with Father. Even though I predicted exactly that when I started playing, I had bought into the ten-year-old-Shaun story enough by that time that I was a bit surprised nevertheless.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

gmalivuk wrote:Spoiler for anyone who hasn't reached the Institute and met its leader yet.

Spoiler:

I am pleased with how they worked in the "twist" with Father. Even though I predicted exactly that when I started playing, I had bought into the ten-year-old-Shaun story enough by that time that I was a bit surprised nevertheless.

Spoiler:

Yeah, my first question out of the Vault sequence was with regard to how much time passed between abduction and the hero's escape. I think they handled this well by putting in the 10-year-old flashbacks in Kellog's recollections, to really sell the 10-year timeframe. Mind you, that praise ends just before the reveal when they used that horribly cliche line "Your son is closer than you think." which telegraphed the twist reveal a few lines of conversation before the twist was actually announced. While it wasn't a massive spoiler it was enough time for my roommate and I to both groan at the bad line and say " 'Father' is his son." before Father could actually drop the reveal.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

I would imagine that you could make better choices to maintain the narrative consistency if you know what is coming, but I wonder what the point is in replaying. Errant Signal went through the details. I feel like the main reason I would replay is to feel weak again, having to scrounge gear and ammo, having to run from fights.

Koa wrote:I would imagine that you could make better choices to maintain the narrative consistency if you know what is coming, but I wonder what the point is in replaying. Errant Signal went through the details. I feel like the main reason I would replay is to feel weak again, having to scrounge gear and ammo, having to run from fights.

I replay to try out different choices and allegiances, for which I don't need to start out weak again.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

So on a side note I started a secondary character on a whim. After all, this a Bethesda game and Bethesda games are not complete until you have created enough characters to populate the small town you made with the modding software. Where is that anyway, I'm still waiting Bethesda!Anyway said character got 10 strength in the beginning, some agility and endurance and from that point onwards proceeded to stab everyone and everything. Melee is fun! I don't know how the late game will hold up, but for now Mr. Stabby Mc Stabberson is awesome.

I have since also made a third character, to focus on building up the Minutemen (my first one went with the Railroad and the second is BoS, so it seems only natural). Though in this one I've also added a lot of settlement-building mods in order to make the towns just how I want them. (Including building upwards and putting stuff on the highway overpasses where appropriate, which I didn't realize was a possibility previously.)

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Well I got my companion perk from Preston. I can now send him off to a settlement I never go to and can finally stop getting those stupid radiant Minutemen quests every 2 seconds when I go back to Sanctuary to fix up my Power armor.

I finished the game once siding with the BoS. I'm pretty sure they're meant to be the "good guys" but really it doesn't come off that way, especially at the end. I considered starting a new character, but considering how much of a completionist I am, I just reloaded an earlier save and will continue along that way. Upped the difficulty to Very Hard and it's a bit more reasonable once you're at the high levels (I think I'm at 54 or something now). One of my settlements got attacked by Super Mutants so I ran off to rescue them and got my ass handed to me by a couple of overlords with rocket launchers. So I need to pay a bit of attention with the difficulty up that high.

BoS were unambiguously the good guys in FO3 under Elder Lyons, but remember that faction had more or less broken away from the main Brotherhood on account of being nice and charitable instead of properly secretive and miserly about technology. They think they're acting for the future of humanity, and as a result they don't concern themselves overmuch with the welfare of individual humans. If you need to wipe out a settlement to secure its crops for the Brotherhood, then so be it. (They're honestly not that different from the Institute in this regard. "We know what's best for humanity, so we are the only ones who should have technology and power, and we may need to kill you from time to time to maintain things that way.")

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

I was exploring along the edge of the map and came across a sort of dead birch forest near a power plant. After I hit quicksave I noticed a Supermutant Behemoth chasing a Deathclaw. Interesting sight, but I tried to avoid them and got to a house with a nice view. Where another Deathclaw waited for me and promptly ripped my asunder. The quicksave loaded and I tried another direction away from the fighting pair. A third Deathclaw on the horizon. So naturally I sprinted in the only direction left (other than backtracing) and arrived near a small town next to the power plant. With a fourth Deathclaw.

Rock Paper Shotgun has a playthrough diary of walking around only the very edge of the map.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

So I'm now a couple hundred hours into my fourth character on a recently-started DLC (and heavily modded) playthrough. The forced linearity of the main story (at least up through "Institutionalized") is really annoying, especially when using an alternate start mod to make the early game more varied. I can't very well roleplay a raider or a shipwreck survivor when all my dialogue options still revolve around being frozen in Vault 111 for the past 200 years. (Though I suppose I could look for a mod that allows me to start Far Harbor without having to progress so far with Valentine first.)

On which note, have other people found mods you really love? What can't you imagine playing without? Are there any that allow you to get replay enjoyment without having to once again pretend (at least in dialogue) to be an emotionally distraught parent who believes your infant son is out there somewhere?

I could obviously search myself, but are there mods that add to the believability of a raider playthrough? I know it's one of the alternate start options, and obviously starting as a raider means siding with them in Nuka-World is also more believable. (I wiped them out on my good-guy Minuteman playthrough, because obviously I wasn't going to start raiding my own settlements.) It would be nice if there was a raider-based way to take out the other main factions so I don't have to do something so obviously contradictory as siding with a restore-order faction while simultaneously creating and defending an extensive network of raider camps.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Stupid question. If you side with the BoS, do you build settlements like the Minutemen do in order for them to "volunteer" food? I've never sided with them, since the whole "exterminate the actually pretty nice ghouls and synths" is a bit of a dealbreaker for me. I could live with the fascism and quasi-enslavement of the commonwealth, but not the genocides. I could see myself siding with the Institute, because ends justifies means and all, until I remember the super mutants; what the fuck were they thinking and why for Pete's sake were they continuing?